SHIELDS COLUMN: Jackson Boxing Club needs help from city

When talking about next week’s Golden Gloves Boxing Tournament to be held at the Golden Gloves Arena close to downtown Jackson, Rhonda Collins admits there won’t be much participation from Jackson boxers.

There will be plenty of competitors from across West Tennessee from places like Covington, Paris and many places between. There will be fighters from Kentucky and Alabama coming in to compete for a chance to move on to regionals later in the spring at Little Rock, Ark.

But Jackson’s representation will be small compared to past years.

“Our boxers haven’t had a lot of time to get ready,” Collins said.

That’s because the JBC essentially had to shut its doors for the winter after the Halloween Bash last fall due to lack of funds.

“Our budget is small and depends on every expense being very close to what it was the year before,” Collins said. “And we’re not sure what happened, but we got the electrical bill after the Bash in October, and it was $500 more than what we’d planned on.

“Paying that bill took away all money we’d planned to use to keep the gym heated during the winter, so without that, we had to close up until we knew it would get warmer.”

The JBC doesn’t charge membership fees because Collins said most of the boxers who work there come from families who can’t afford it.

The only charge requested is the $75 fee to be registered in the organization to be able to compete in Golden Gloves tournaments. According to Collins, even then the gym will try to take care of one or two that can’t pay. Sometimes Rhonda and her husband Rayford will take care of it from their own pocket.

That’s why the Golden Gloves tournament and Halloween Bash are so important to the cause of the JBC, without those, there’s no funding for the gym.

There was a time when the city of Jackson helped fund the JBC, but that ended about 20 years ago, despite public acknowledgments since then the service it’s been to the city since Rayford opened the gym more than a half-century ago.

Rhonda wouldn’t get specific about people that have come through training at the JBC, but she did say people who have moved on from lessons learned from Rayford have made something of themselves.

“There are business owners, politicians, judges, police officers and all sorts of people throughout the city who spent time growing up training at the gym,” Rhonda said. “I’d bet if we talked to them right now, they’d say the training Rayford and our coaches gave them helped them be successful today.”

Those lessons weren’t necessarily the best way to throw a jab or how to execute a perfect right cross. There are similar lessons across all avenues of sports that are taught best in athletics children will probably never learn in a classroom – perseverance to go that next round when your legs seem to rubbery to get off the stool in the corner, taking a hit to the face and having the gumption to stay standing and prepared to either take the next hit or fire back, getting off the mat when you do take that next hit and it knocks you down, the art of planning your attack and goading your opponent into defending one direction before you hit him from the other and simple things like balance and cardio are just a few lessons one can learn in years of boxing training.

But that opportunity is dissipating with each year that passes. Funding decreases, bills increase and no help is in sight.

“We’ve got registration fees we have to pay as a gym and club just to host the tournament next week,” Rhonda said. “Then there are the expenses of putting the actual event on – running a concession stand, heating and lighting the building, running water – it all adds up when you don’t have a set income of money coming in.”

The gym keeps its expenses to the necessities. Events like the tournament and Bash are usually the only time the lights are on (at least this year with no training in the winter). Training is typically done during the day before the sun goes down. No air conditioning is used during the summer because they open all the doors, including a large loading dock door from the days when the gym was a warehouse, to allow air to circulate while boxers are training.

When asked if anyone consistently helps the gym, Rhonda credits three doctors at Sports Orthopedic and Spine – Scott Johnson, Keith Nord and Bradley Wright – for making sure there’s someone at each event offering pre- and post-fight medical services at no charge.

“We have to have that person here, and if we had to pay them we’d have to close up,” Collins said. “We appreciate them so much.”

Rhonda said it would be a huge help to the gym if any person or business that has the means could step in and offer to help the gym in some financial way. With the way people in this city have been helped for five decades, some type of annual pledge or a significant gift for the gym wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, particularly out of gratitude for Rayford and all he’s done for the city of Jackson.

“It’s been proven over the years this gym does good for the kids because it’s kept a lot of young men over the years out of trouble,” Rhonda said. “If it saves one boy and keeps him out of trouble and helps him straighten up into an upstanding citizen when he grows up, the gym has done its job.”

Brandon Shields is the high school sports columnist for The Jackson Sun. Contact him at 425-9751 or at bjshields@jacksonsun.com. Follow him on Twitter @JSEditorBrandon or on Instagram at jacksonsunsports.